As three police officers responding to a domestic violence call waited outside a home in Farmington, N.M., one of them asked if they had the right address, moments before an armed man answered the door and was shot to death this month, newly released video footage shows.
The call for police assistance had been for another home on the same street.
The footage and audio recordings from 911 calls, both of which were released on Friday by the Farmington Police Department, show confusion among police officers and include a desperate plea from a relative of the man who was killed.
The video was recorded by body cameras worn by Farmington officers on April 5, the day of the shooting. The three officers were responding to the call for assistance in Farmington, a city about 140 miles from Alburquerque in the rural northwest corner of New Mexico, but they knocked on a door across the street from the intended address.
In the video, the number 5305 is visible on an exterior wall of the home, even though the officers were dispatched to 5308 Valley View Avenue.
After waiting for a response to their knocks, an officer asks the others if they are at the correct address.
“Is it 43 or 5308?” another officer asks over police radio. The dispatcher then says the correct address.
“Don’t tell me I’m wrong,” the officer says, and then chuckles.
About two minutes elapse from the time of the initial knock to when the door is opened. The officers can be seen knocking two other times in the interim.
A man later identified as Robert Dotson, 52, opens the front door and a screen door armed with a handgun, which he appears to lift and point toward an officer before the police shoot him. The video has been edited to show a circle around the gun in a slow-motion playback of this moment.
The names of the officers involved have not been released and will continue to be withheld “until disclosure would not affect the integrity of the investigation,” the Police Department’s chief, Steve Hebbe, said in a statement.
In the video, moments after Mr. Dotson is shot, a woman who was later identified as his wife can be heard screaming. She then approaches the front door and opens fire at the officers, but she stops upon realizing that they are police officers. Officers shoot back at her, but she is not injured.
The footage was taken from the body cameras of all three officers at the scene, none of whom were injured in the encounter. The New Mexico State Police is investigating the shooting.
Recordings of four 911 calls related to the original dispatch and the resulting shooting have also been released by the Police Department.
One call was from someone who identified herself as a 14-year-old inside 5305 Valley View Avenue, the house in which Mr. Dotson was shot. Through tears, she says her mother told her to call 911 because her father, whom she identified by name later in the call, had been shot.
The dispatcher first tells her that the gunshots were from police activity in the area, until she understands that the caller meant that someone at her own home had been shot.
“Yes, someone shot at my father, definitely,” the caller says, adding, “I’m so scared.”
The caller says she is in a room with her brother and dog.
“Can you pray with me, please?” she asks the dispatcher.
Two of the other 911 calls that were released came from neighbors who were concerned about the gunshots they heard.
The fourth audio recording was from the initial domestic violence call, which originated from across the street from where the officers ultimately knocked. The police later investigated the initial domestic call and reported no further complications from that location.
The Farmington Police Department will release additional records and files about the encounter after they have been reviewed by legal counsel, Chief Hebbe said.
“All of us — the men and women of the Farmington Police Department — recognize the severity of this incident,” he said in a statement posted on Facebook. “We will do everything we can to ensure a fuller understanding of what took place.”
